


What's on Your Mind?

by Jak_the_ATAT



Series: Four Endings for Adler and Bell [1]
Category: Call of Duty (Video Games)
Genre: Adler is a little shit, Bell is a bit psycho, Bell is a woman, Graphic descriptions of corpses, Horror, Mildly Creepy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Zombies, non-canon ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:29:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27635477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jak_the_ATAT/pseuds/Jak_the_ATAT
Summary: SPOILERS FOR BOCW!!!! Full summary inside to avoid spoilers.Seriously, DO NOT SPOIL IT FOR YOURSELF
Series: Four Endings for Adler and Bell [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2032369
Comments: 277
Kudos: 40





	What's on Your Mind?

**Author's Note:**

> Full summary: It's been two months since Europe was destroyed. Two months since Adler and his crew should have died. And yet, somehow, Adler continues to climb through Bell's window every night. 
> 
> This is my first COD fic. Don't kill me for bad characterization please?

It was on the lonely nights that Adler appeared. He didn't do much. He simply stood, sat, stared, smoked, or sometimes spoke. And when the morning sun retuned, he would drift away, pretending he was never there.

 _'And he shouldn't be,'_ Bell thought to herself. _'He's not here and you're just going crazy.'_

But Adler remained consistent. He appeared each night when Bell wanted someone with her. Of course, Bell would have preferred to have someone who would comfort her, but only Adler responded to her quiet calls.

Tonight was no different. Adler slipped through the window by picking it open with a pocket knife. He sat in the corner with his legs against his chest to keep his feet from hitting her sleeping comrades, who were travelling east to Siberia with her to get away from government eyes. He lit a cigarette and puffed away. 

Bell ignored him at first, but eventually the smell of cigarette got to her nose. _'Go away,'_ she thought. Adler didn't listen. He remained silent, taking the time to put his knife into his picket and exchange it for an M1911, which he balanced on one knee with great precision. Bell stared down the barrel of the .45. If he did shoot, he better have an escape plan or be a damned good shot with nimble reloading skills. One bullet would wake the entire room, and Adler stood no chance against 80 automatics.

Bell rolled over so her back was facing Adler. If he wouldn't go away, she wouldn't give him attention. She closed her eyes and eased her breathing into an even pace, though her body refused to stop shaking. _'He's just wasting his time here,'_ she thought. _'He should be fucking Park in Hell or something. Are they even old enough for each other?'_ Yet just when she thought she might have some peace, a shuffling sound forced her to open her eyes.

Adler was now on the other side of the room, still staring.

"Go away," Bell hissed so the other members wouldn't wake.

"You really need to stop thinking about me," Adler's gruff voice rolled more than usual, something Bell only heard once before when Adler was flirting with a lady who he later arrested. "Or people will talk." He smirked and continued to puff.

"You're not the real Adler," Bell whispered back. "Adler never smirks."

"You believe in doppelgängers? Or do you prefer to call them Vedmak?" The low, rumbling voice continued. Had this been in a different context, Bell may have actually been surprised how more relaxed Adler could sound. But not here. Not in the dead of the night, with the wind blowing and the moonlight highlighting the swaying trees' shadows. "That's very unlike you, Bell. You didn't come off as someone who believes in witchers."

Slowly, Adler stood and began to pick his way through the crowd of bodies, his feet strategically finding open spots between people's heads. Blood rushed to Bell's heart, overworking it until she felt she may just die of a heart attack. Her limbs, now blood-starved, dropped temperature so fast she couldn't move them. Her gaze followed Adler's hand, which moved out of sight into his pocket then returned with a syringe.

"What's on your mind, Bell? You can tell me."

In a flurry of uncoordinated movements, Bell leapt to her feet and grabbed her pistol. She worked her own way through her sleeping comrades towards the door. She almost made it clean, but a quick glance to check on Adler resulting in her foot catching one of her comrade's legs. "Hey, fuck you, dude," her comrade huffed before going straight back to sleep.

Adler hadn't stopped smiling. He wasn't even looking at his feet, and yet he almost caught up to her. Thrusting her shoulder into the door, she cracked the ice around it and forced it open.

The outdoors did not help her situation. Her toes curled upon her bare feet touching the tundra ground. The wind beat at her hair, obscuring her vision at times by wrapping it around her face. It occurred to her far too late that she was only wearing one simple gown that hardly covered her. _'Why can't you come at a time when I'm not so disorganized?'_

Adler followed her outside, shutting the door behind him. He was no longer smiling. Instead, the same coldness she saw when he tried to access her memories sat upon his face. "Stay back!" Bell screamed, now free to let her voice go. Some hair got caught in her mouth and she clawed at it to set it free.

"You had a chance, Bell," Adler continued to closer the distance between them. "You could have made a name for yourself."

"You took everything from me!" Bell raised the pistol, her free hand clinging to her opposing shoulder in an attempt to cover her chest. "My memories! My autonomy! My identity!" A gust of wind whipped her hair about, ice particles nicking at her cheek and bad eye. Her feet, which had finally warmed a little spot for her to stand, became misplaced as the wind threatened to knock her over.

Adler remained unfazed.

"What more do you want?" Bell demanded. "What else do I have left?"

Adler took one more puff of his cigarette before dropping it to the ground and crushing it under his toe. "Bell, you took everything I need to get rid of." He removed his glasses, and sighed, staring at her. "It's time we finish it here."

"I'm not going down to you," snarled Bell.

Adler's clothes began to soak red on his right side. The hand with the syringe twitched, drawing Bell's eyes down to it. She remembered that very needle. How could she forget? It went through her eye. Multiple times. Adler was in such a hurry to get her memories he never bothered to use a sterile needle for each script, leading to blindness in her left eye.

By the time she refocused her gaze away from his hand, Adler had closed the distance. Bell's body froze as she stared into Adler's eyes. Except... the man before her was no longer Adler, but his corpse fresh after she killed him, the knife still in his chest. With each step he took, the world around them transformed into the laboratory. One misstep backwards in an attempt to get away from Adler landed her in a gurney. She fought to get back up but someone strapped her legs down. "This isn't real!" She wailed. Her chest collided into Adler's hand, which shoved her down. Adler strapped her chest, tightening the binds too much until she couldn't comfortable hyperventilate.

Bell's eyes met Adler's. His face started to shift, skin sloughing off the bones and falling around her head. One particularly large piece brushed her cheek. "If it wasn't real, we wouldn't be here." Adler scoffed. "We wouldn't even be here if you made the right choice." Bell attempted to raise her arm arms, only to discover they too had been strapped down.

Adler leaned over her and curled back the left of his lips, baring his yellow teeth. "It's a damned shame you didn't."

Bell watched as the syringe closed down towards her eye...

And screamed.

* * *

It was Perseus who first found her, or so she was told. He had picked up the weak, shivering, practically naked girl and carried her inside. Her comrades immediately set about nursing her, stripping her of her night clothes, wrapping her in blankets, and working the icy pistol away from her skin, which left a nasty burn in place. Now, Bell sat by a little fire started by the owner of the house, wrapped in at least four blankets. And yet she still didn't feel warm.

She had been kept up for most of the day, her comrades worried that if she slept now, she would never wake up. Needless to say, as the sun and moon exchanged positions, exhaustion rest deep in her body, and though she wasn't done with her tea, she put the cup to the side and pulled the blankets closer.

Bell had yet to tell anyone what she saw out there.

 _'He's dead,'_ she told herself as the last of her comrades finished their night routines. Someone blew out the last candle as a chorus of "Спокойной ночи" mumbled about. Only the fire remained bright.

 _'He's not coming back. I killed him,'_ she told herself again and again. Her mind replayed her arms snapping the binds. She relieved the eight bullets she laid into the corpse, watching each of them explode upon contact and blowing Adler to pieces. He'd never survive that. No one could.

"You really need to stop thinking about me. Or people will talk."

Bell's eyes snapped open. Climbing through the window, knife in hand, was none other than Russell Adler, that menacing cigarette rooted between his lips.

Bell buried her head in the blankets as Adler approached her.

**Author's Note:**

> I personally have not played the game (because I don't have a good computer) but I've seen others play it and thought "I don't think Bell would walk away without some trauma from being experimented on multiple times."
> 
> The other thought I had during Bell's memory scene was "why is Adler injecting Bell with bare hands? Bell just saved a bleeding Park/Lazar, and was yanked along at breakneck speeds in the air, and then Adler basically dragged Bell into the safehouse. And there's no indication that Adler took any safety precautious with sanitation like switching the needle out after a few uses or whatnot." And then I remember that Adler probably doesn't care so long as he gets his answers. 
> 
> 'Tis what happens when your dumb ass keeps looking for realism in medical scenes.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed!


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